


Basically Fine

by whitchry9



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Drug Abuse, Drug Use, Episode: s04e02 The Lying Detective, Gen, Medical, Missing Scene, Spoilers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-01-11
Updated: 2017-01-11
Packaged: 2018-09-16 18:38:49
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 993
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9284960
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/whitchry9/pseuds/whitchry9
Summary: What happened during the ambulance ride. Molly observes, Sherlock lies.





	

**Author's Note:**

> HELLO FRIENDS I AM SHERLOCK TRASH ONCE AGAIN.  
> Thank god it only happens once every 2 years, I can't handle this emotional strain.  
> Anyway have some medically accurate stuff that I spent far too much time researching.

Molly glared at him as the ambulance pulled away from the kerb.

“Shirt off.”

“Wow, that didn't take you long, did it?” Sherlock smirked.

Molly only crossed her arms and frowned at him. “You told me two weeks ago that you'd need a fully stocked ambulance and me to show up at an address you gave me. You didn't tell me why, you didn't give me any more explanation than that. Today I show up and you're high, and apparently have been for a while. I know that she died, but we are _all_ suffering, not just you. Take it off.”

He shrugged out of his shirt. She knew there were scars on his back, but it was the scars on his front that caught her eye, shining paler than the rest of him, if that was even possible.

She snapped her gloves on and traced the track marks down his arm. Right and left this time. “Are you that good with a needle or is Billy helping you? I hardly think he'd be so willing to help you self destruct.”

Sherlock ignored her, looking away.

She chose not to comment, and instead busied herself with pressing leads on his chest and hooking them up to examine the print out of his heart rhythm.

“Prolonged QT interval. ST elevation. Tented T waves. Amplified R waves.” More that she probably didn't know how to read.

She turned to glare at him.

“Low heart rate, although I can't be sure if that's normal for you or not. I'd expect tachycardia with cocaine.”

Sherlock plucked the leads off his chest. “Yes, well.”

“The T waves and R waves aren't specific to cocaine use, more likely hyperkalemia.”

“Yup,” Sherlock agreed, popping the word like satisfying bubble. “Probably fucked up my kidneys,” he noted with detachment, and Molly was infuriated. Cocaine could cause any number of kidney problems, including an infarction that could destroy an entire kidney in the span of a few hours. He might not even notice the pain because of the drugs. A person could live without one kidney, could even function with both kidneys only half working, but Sherlock was playing Russian roulette with more than one bullet in the chamber.

“Well, nice that you know that. You keep going like this, you're going to need dialysis. Believe me, that won't be fun, mostly because you'll need a central line. No doctor in their right mind will use your arm veins with how wrecked they are.”

She poked at one of his ribs and then pinched his upper arm.

“You're also at least 10% under your minimum body weight. _Minimum,_ ” she emphasized. “You were barely there before. You're malnourished. Have you even been eating?”

“I wanted to have tea this morning. But Mrs Hudson held a gun to me instead,” he said forlornly.

Molly blinked at him. “Right,” she muttered. “I'm not even going to ask.”

She rummaged in a shelf nearby and pulled out a glucometer. “Finger,” she ordered.

Sherlock held up the middle one.

“Mature,” she huffed, rubbing it with an alcohol swab and coaxing a droplet of blood out of it.

“Mildly hypoglycemic,” she told him a second later. “Probably because the last thing you had was through a syringe. Stimulants reduce the appetite, and considering you rarely ate while you weren't taking them, I can only assume you've only been eating when physically forced.”

Sherlock shrugged. “I'll leave you to your deductions.”

“You wanted me because I wouldn't deduce anything. Right? Or is it because this is all an elaborate ploy to get you back on speaking terms with John.”

“That's not... That's not what I'm trying to do.”

“Right.”

“That's not the entirety of what I'm trying to do,” Sherlock amended.

Strangely enough, she didn't believe him. She knew he was probably working five or six steps ahead, and had apparently been doing so for a while, considering he told her she'd be needed weeks ago.

But in the end, things always seemed to come back to John.

“I suppose it's pointless to ask if you're hallucinating, because even if you could recognize it, you sure as hell wouldn't tell me, right? Easy enough to hide those, unless they're interfering with your deductions, am I right? And after all, you wouldn't be able to tell. You want to know what I've deduced? Even if you don't, too bad. Your temperature is elevated, you're twitching, you're doing your best not to vomit, and your pupils are dilated despite the bright lights of the ambulance,” Molly pointed out. “Those are just things I can see, and you know damn well everyone else can too. But it's what they can't see that's going to kill you. Malnourishment, kidney failure, rhabdomyolysis, hell, even a heart attack, any of these things could kill you tomorrow-”

“Molly, Molly,” Sherlock interrupted, sounding cheery. She wanted to slap him. “We both know it's more likely I have a month before those things catch up with me.”

“Three weeks, at the outside.”

Sherlock considered. “I suppose you're right. Isn't time funny like that? It just keeps _going._ ”

The ambulance slowed to a stop.

“Beat John here by a good three minutes, I'll bet,” Sherlock told her cheerily, doing his shirt up and leaning back on the gurney.

She sighed, throwing the rear doors open to let more light in, served the bastard right, and sat on the back. Behind her, Sherlock was humming to himself, something familiar, maybe Beethoven.

 

Sure enough, three minutes later the limo pulled up and John climbed out, striding over to them.

“Well, how is he?” he asked.

“Basically fine,” Sherlock chimed in from behind her, getting to his feet and stumbling around in the ambulance to get his coat on.

 

 _Not even close,_ Molly thought, but didn't say, and instead carefully composed how best to tell John that his best friend was killing himself while they all watched.

She just hoped he'd listen.

 


End file.
